Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh – Scottish Southern Gothic

Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) by Irvine Welsh is a curious jumble of various states of consciousness, memory, nightmare, coma and near wakefulness. The protagonist is Roy Strang, born in Leith in Scotland where he grew up in the scheme, a low rent housing project, basically the slums of town. His father is a happily prejudiced drunkard, his mother about the same. He also has three brothers: Tony, a handsome womanizer, Bernard, the flamboyant poetry-writing gay and Elgin, who is not all the way with it. Kim, his sister is described as whiney, promiscuous and not too bright. To say that the Strang family is dysfunctional is putting it mildly. There’s violence, drugs, mental illness, drinking and incest, just to mention a few minor details. There’s also the beloved family dog, Winston, who has attacked and maimed Roy when he was a boy, but who is still doted on by the rest of the family.
That’s one level of the story, told mostly in reminiscences and in a Scottish dialect, which takes some getting used to, for me at least. It’s very consistent, though, and you find yourself getting along with it just fine after a while.

The second level of the story takes place in Roy’s “deeper”, a place he runs to in his subconscious when he comes too close to the surface of waking up out of his coma. This fantasy world is a kind of Africa filtered through wishful thinking, at least initially, where Roy and his companion Sandy hunt the evil Marabou Stork. The stork itself has almost demonic qualities and certainly mythical ones, but it is a myth created out of Roy’s experiences in the actual, real South Africa where his family relocates in the hope of turning their lives around. In Africa they live with Roy’s uncle who repeatedly molests the young Roy and bribes him into silence with gifts and threats.

The lead character is in a coma here, and that makes the narrator so unreliable you have to really be careful where you put your trust, as you see in the very last chapters. It is also evident that Roy has done something to wind up in a coma. Every time he starts to surface he deliberately turns away from the waking world and dives back down deeper, something that’s shown typographically in the text. It’s never difficult to tell where we are, which level of reality we are dealing with. It is, however, sometimes difficult to make any kind of sound judgement of what’s really going on, because it’s obvious some of the tension created for Roy is between lies and truths and secrets he’s keeping and that spills over into the text.

Everything about this story is grim and dark and tastes like Scottish Southern Gothic the whole way through. It’s close enough to horror in the more original sense that the pure joy of the telling is sometimes the only thing that carries the reader. Roy is not a very likeable character, and it does not really matter that he is shaped by his circumstance, which he agrees with himself. He is aware of his own darkness, flaunts it at times and talks of how violence is sometimes preferable to sex. He perpetuates the cycle of vicious denigrating violence himself, takes to football hooliganism like an answer, sticks a blade in a classmate when he’s just a kid and in an act of coolly calculated menace kills the family dog in retribution for the injuries he suffered as a child.
The main stumbling block is however, sexual violence, but I’m not giving away the whole game here by telling how and why that plays such a pivotal role in Roy’s current state. Suffice to say that as the novel progresses, things get increasingly more disturbing and in the end all the levels of narrative are infused with this undercurrent of disintegration and violence until finally Roy gets to the end of the tale.

There is always this yearning for redemption in this kind of literature, both from the characters themselves and from the reader. There is no way there could be a happy ending to a tale as sordid as this one, but redemption is something else altogether. This thing, however, just has to run its course and redemption is not really an option.

On a technical level this is really brilliant work. It surfs between the heavy Scottish accent and the more refined speech of Roy and Sandy, which is comically precise in it’s elocution and very much The Queen’s English. Roy is not by any means stupid, or an oaf, or unaware of what he himself is doing and that only serves to drive the point home.

This is overall a very interesting read, consistent and true to the narrative parameters it sets up. It’s not for the shiny, happy crowd, but if you like your stories dark, gothic, smart and intriguing – then this is a good choice.

Mule

The Joe Pitt Series by Charlie Huston – Vampires in New York

Charlie Huston – The Joe Pitt series

Already Dead (2005)

No Dominion (2006)

Half the Blood of Brooklyn (2007)

Charlie Huston has come up with a brilliant concept. You take the modern day vampire myth as we have come to know it through writers like Anne Rice and mix it with a good old fashioned hard boiled detective noir reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and set it in a gritty New York filled with vampires, zombies and regular folks and you get a very good ride.

The protagonist Joe Pitt is a vampire. He’s got the blood lust and the superhuman strength and the usual foibles and weaknesses and he’s about as cynical as you could expect from a guy who has been around a little too long and seen a little too much. The vampires of New York are organised in clans, like mobsters and they are about as territorial and dangerous. Each clan has its own philosophy, and there are all manner of politics as you could expect, and Joe gets caught right in the middle of it, despite being a rogue, which is more or less the equivalent of a Ronin – tolerated, as long as he is useful.

I’ve read three of the books in this series so far, Already Dead (2005), No Dominion (2006) and Half the Blood of Brooklyn (2007).

The first novel gives a good indication of where we are going right from the get go. The opening paragraph on page one reads:

“I smell them before I see them. All the powders, perfumes and oils the half-smart ones smear on themselves. The stupid ones just stumble around reeking. The really smart ones take a Goddamn shower. The water doesn’t help them in the long run, but the truth is, nothing is gonna help them in the long run. In the long run they’re gonna die. Hell, in the long run they’re already dead.” (Already Dead)

And that sets the scene. We get the dry commentary voice-over that conjures up a black-and-white old Marlowe detective story with all that that entails, like ladies with dangerous curves and chunky glasses of whiskey and rough villains and a mastermind in a silk suit with a silver cigarette case. This isn’t ever going to be anything other than what it advertises itself as, but – that being said – there are still quite a few ways in which it could be a whole lot less.

Huston, however, doesn’t disappoint. He actually pulls it off and then some.

You get language like this: “Color me pensive. Color me lost in thought and avoiding getting on the train, lighting a cigarette without even thinking about it, because that’s my story. That’s my excuse for why I don’t smell Tom until the fucker jams the barrel of his gun in my back”. (No Dominion).

For all of Pitt’s tough talk, though, he’s not just muscle for hire, even if it seems to be a role he finds it convenient to play. He’s fallen in love with a woman who is dying from HIV, and that’s another clever twist of the overall vampire myth seeing as how vampirism has always been compared to other diseases of the blood like syphilis and malaria.

If it seems like I know a little too much about the vampire myth, believe me, I do. I have read a lot of vampire stories, enough that they have their own section in my library. This is pulp, by it’s own admission. You’ll find Charlie Huston’s stories over at pulpnoir.com. Still, there is pulp and there is trash and the twain should not be confused.

This is smart, savvy, intuitive and intelligent pulp. It takes a lot of cues from a format you will recognize and affords the reader the pleasure of recognition at the same time as giving it a unique voice. There’s nothing wrong with clichés as long as you do something creative with them and Charlie Huston does.

The Enclave, for instance, are the mystics of the bunch. They believe that if they starve themselves long enough and thoroughly enough they will be able to walk in the sun. It just fits that there would be one group that went this way, became monks and tried to reach the next level, because somehow there has to be more to life than just this.

I’ve argued, and believe me it’s not always been a popular view, that vampires are trying to teach us how to die. Practically every vampire legend, story, or franchise always snags on the ennui and pointlessness of living forever. The toll it takes, the cost of giving up human society and all that we grade as natural always ends with a yearning towards death. In most vampire stories you come in either at the beginning, or at the very end, when the stake hits the chest cavity. It’s good to drop down somewhere in the middle and see what that might mean.

This is light, easy, bloody and enjoyable all the way through, provided that you have a taste for the basic genre itself. It’s also violent, dark and cynically funny. Above all it has a voice of its own, and that’s hard to find.

Mule

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

This is a Christopher Priest novel written in 1995.

Now this novel has all the trappings that should make a successful story. At the heart of the story is the bitter feud between two stage magicians Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier.

The reader is first introduced to the grandchildren of these two magicians who are investigating what really happened between the two and the effects this has had on their own lives almost a century later.

The overall structure is very familiar to anyone who has even a glancing knowledge of the classical Gothic horror story. We have the large house with its unspeakable secrets hidden in the basement, in this particular case the Tesla machine, we have the secrets hidden in the manuscripts of Borden and Angier – manuscripts found and read in the middle of a dark and stormy night leading to horrible conclusions. And towards the very end the main character even goes into the cavernous basement where the past becomes known in all its decadent gory glory. The basement also happens to double as a family tomb.

So – yeah, I’ve seen this before.

Another main theme of the novel is the “dark double”, another Gothic classic. Stage magicians rely heavily on the prestige, the reveal at the end of a magic trick. And they rely on deceit. Some magicians go further than others in staging an illusion – and there is throughout the novel a discussion of whether Borden is one or two men. He might actually be a set of identical twins, something that figures heavily in his most famous trick “The New Transported Man” – an illusion that plagues and harrows Angier until he actually finds a way to replicate and improve on act.

But Angier takes it further than Borden. He finds a way to actually transport himself, at a high cost, via his Tesla machine. The machine itself is a classic Gothic horror too, complete with coils and wires and electrical flashes. He pays through the nose to have the machine constructed and then pays a more subtle price for using it.

All this makes for one fine and lurid tale indeed. Problem is, I know the conventions too well and find myself unaffected by the prose. The epistolary style leaves me cold, it is written in a way that’s meant to be a couple of diaries and when the voice does not appeal to you as a reader you quickly lose interest. I like Borden, there is a greater sense of mystery there, but the diary of Angier is quite frankly dull. It doesn’t bother with evoking the period, it doesn’t sketch the personality of the author to any great extent,  merely cataloguing the main events.

The ending is supposed to be a big reveal, but by the time we get there I have frankly lost interest. Borden, who is the foil all through the action, is summarily knocked-off earlier and we are left with the vestiges of the prestige of Angier

I can’t really go in to it in greater detail than that without giving it all away.

I remain sadly unimpressed. But then I have read all the classics in the genre, The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Inmost Light and The Fall of the House of Usher to mention but a few – and they are by far a much more interesting read. Mostly I think because in and around the horrors are woven the minute and detailed character portraits that drive the action. If you want Gothic go straight to the source.  Start with Arthur Machen. Leave The Prestige for those who have not read the forerunners.

Or watch the movie. It makes good the promises of costume, time and suspense in a way you could only infer in the novel.

Mule